1. Yes, this is something we never paid attention to. Thanks for bringing this out. We’ll fix this in 2.6

2. This has been changed, already and you’d see this in 2.6

3. Leaving the UI alone was a deliberate decision. The styling and presentation of BuddyPress media is left to the theme. Such CSS can be added to the theme’s stylesheet. Now that BuddyPress 1.7 is on the way and it works with any WordPress theme, we would be able to improve the UI without worrying about whether a bad theme will break everything.

Even then, the width and height and such things will be left to the theme. As far as images are concerned, we choose to use the attachment sizes defined in your WordPress media settings, forthe sake of keeping the plugin light. We just take the image, hand it over to WordPress which does everything as if you have uploaded media to a post. We then use the processed attachment post type and sizes.

The sitewide media pages are also on our todo list.

Finally, we’re fixing the widget and like I said, it involves jquery and tabbing and hence is prone to interference from themes and that is why it takes tome to get to the best approach.

Now, as for the last issue. We release BuddyPress Media as soon as possible with the bare minimum features and let users like you help us refine it. For example, admin added a new musicis something that we wouldn’t miss if we had a media professional on board guiding us and pointing such oversights.

Some cases like using the post count seem perfectly fine in foresight and ridiculous in hindsight.

A lot of things we do very well, and for a lot others we expect people to help us. That is why the best we can do is keep our ears open.

We still believe that such basic media functionality must be a part of core BuddyPress. Without media, there is no true social networking. So, this will remain free. However, you are absolutely right. It takes man hours and there are no monetary incentives. This doesdoes slow down the development. It does stop us from doing all that we can do with the features, if we could spend more time on it.

That is also something that the community can help us with. If you want a feature as badly as you’d hire someone to do for you, hire us. Sponsor the feature. We’ll develop it and release it, faster and better than now. Now, we dodo this second to earning our bread! In exchange of your money, you’ll get your features and good karma. That’s the general donation idea.

Interesting comments and im glad to know these are some things you are working on but i still think the styling options are a must,

It would just solve all kind of conflict problems if we could choose widths and hieghts for the items on single item pages and activity streams/gallerys

I understand your trying to keep it lightwieght but dont you think your underestimating the use of your plugin

Bp-Media is basically features as you said that buddypress should have built in anyways, it transforms a crappy plugin into a fully functional social network with features we all want an need making its a big part of buddypress sites but lets face it buddypress dont give a shit the unnatural slow progress of the plugin proves that, so i wouldnt worry to much about keeping it lightwieght and just go ahead and put in the essentials.

Ive noticed padding is off for the media play bars.

I would also suggest making a media menu ( ALL ) as the default profile tab under media instead of photos.

Use icons for the play/mute items etc on the video player and music player.

Remove upload of all the tabs and have it only on the upload page,

Option for upload pics to be set as avatar

Also remove bpmedia from the admin menu as buddypress is now in the settings it would help us admins keep our backend tidy to many plugins add on there rather than in settings which is where the stuff should be kept.

I’m actually using this plugin on a local host to test things before i migrate my live site to a single install wp, ive just updated the plugin an noticed now i have bullet marks for the widget and still all listing down but like you said your working on it i just thought id mention it.

And as for your premium addons i want to keep all my files on mywebsite not else where an not sent to be converted giving me complete ownership so its back to why not include more formats it in the plugin.

I seriously reccommend you reconsider adding this plugin on codecanyon why not have bp-media+ on codecanyon with more features such as i mentioned and better support etc and have a free minmium lightweight version for here

This way it would be worthwhile and i honestly believe it would be the highest selling bp plugin on codecanyon so the man hours would be worth it.

Anyways all in all i think this is the best bp plugin out there it just needs some tweaks and i look very much forward to when you have the sitewide gallerys added

It would just solve all kind of conflict problems if we could choose widths and hieghts for the items on single item pages and activity streams/gallerys

We do agree with this on a certain level. We must evolve. We are just experimenting with BuddyPress 1.7 beta to see if this will still be necessary. Like I said, we kept a hand off approach as far as UI was concerned in the long wait for 1.7. This includes using icons and improving the player UI.

I would also suggest making a media menu ( ALL ) as the default profile tab under media instead of photos.

This has been under consideration for a while, internally. We’ll add this soon as this will kick off a lot of improvements, especially in the stalled Groups integration.

Remove upload of all the tabs and have it only on the upload page

This was the case earlier, we moved the uploader to all the tabs since this saved a couple of clicks and navigation just for uploading. This will get revised progressively, as the UI matures.

Also remove bpmedia from the admin menu

This can be disabled from the settings.

i have bullet marks for the widget and still all listing down

Again, this is very theme dependent and we’re just waiting for 1.7 to be officially released to improve it.

Option for upload pics to be set as avatar

It is an interesting feature and good to have. This will be pretty late on our roadmap unless sponsored earlier.

i want to keep all my files on mywebsite not else where an not sent to be converted giving me complete ownership so its back to why not include more formats it in the plugin

There’s hardly any widespread support for any format except MP4. Hence, it isn’t really useful to include any other format. We have two addons:

FFMPEG addon: All the conversion happens on your own server, so you have full ownership and control. This however needs more than a shared hosting provider. It also creates thumbnails for videos

Kaltura addon: This is for people who would rather use a Kaltura account/server to get the conversion done and host the site on a minimal server

As far as the last point is concerned, as per our ambitions, this minimal version still has some maturity to attain. As of now, we’re sticking to keeping generic/fundamental features as free and special/ edge-case/ premium features as paid modular add-ons.

For eg, the ability to select avatars from media files is not essential. Anybody can upload the same image at both places. To be able to do so at a click of a button is a special feature, that deserves to be premium.

In any case, there are two add-ons that are nearing completion, for the following purposes,